1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic mail terminal with a character string converting function and an electronic mail system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent years, a portable phone terminal is provided for a data transmission function in addition to a telephone function. The transmission and reception of an electronic mail is possible between such portable phone terminals by use of the data transmission function of the portable phone terminal. For this reason, in the portable phone terminal, it is generally made possible to input not only alphanumeric characters but also Japanese characters including Kanji characters. In this way, an advanced function is requested for character input and character display, while the portable phone terminal is requested to have a small size and a light weight. Therefore, it is an important key to create a sentence efficiently with few keys and also to display the sentence efficiently in a small display space.
Conventionally, a method of using a pictograph called an icon has been generally used in such a situation. For example, a pictograph associated with a bicycle is used when the character string of “bicycle” is to be inputted. This allows the creation of a sentence to be made easy without change the intention of the sentence, so that a display area can be saved. Such a technique is disclosed in Japanese Laid Open Patent Application (JP-A-Heisei 6-96056) as a first conventional example which describes a sentence creating technique using a pictograph. In the first conventional example, it is supposed that the Japanese sentence of “” (“Harenara tenisuwo siyou”; “Let's play tennis, if whether is fine” in English) is inputted by a user and a pictograph conversion is Instructed. In this case, morpheme analysis is carried out to divide the Japanese sentence into the character strings of “ (hare)”, “ (nara)”, “ (tenisu)”, “ (wo)”, and “ (siyou)”. Then, a pictograph dictionary is used which stores a correspondence relation between phonetic expression and the pictograph of the Japanese character string. The pictograph dictionary is searched based on the character strings to retrieve pictographs corresponding to the character strings of “hare” and “tenisu”. In this case, if there are a plurality of pictograph candidates for a single Japanese character string, the pictograph candidates are displayed for the user. The user selects one of the displayed pictograph candidates.
By the way, an electronic mail system between the portable phone terminals has been conventionally constructed. However, in recent years, it has become possible to connect the portable phone terminal to the Internet based on the standard of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), so that an electronic mail which is sent on the Internet can be directly received by the portable phone terminal.
However, in the access to the Internet electronic mail by the portable phone terminal, there are following problems.
As the first problem, visibility is not good when the Internet electronic mail is displayed. As mentioned above, the pictographs are used in the conventional electronic mail transmission and reception between the portable phone terminals. However, no countermeasure is generally taken in the Internet electronic mail. That is, the electronic mail including pictographs cannot be sent. Therefore, when a long Internet electronic mail is displayed on a small display area of the portable phone terminal, a screen switching operation is required to switch the screens.
As the second problem, the whole sentence of an electronic mail sometimes can not be received when the long Internet electronic mail is received by the portable phone terminal. The reason is that the maximum electronic mail length is determined in the portable phone terminal electronic mail system, and a part of the electronic mail exceeding the maximum electronic mail length is not possible to be received by the portable phone terminal.
In conjunction with the above description, a communications system and a digital communication terminal are disclosed in Japanese Laid Open Patent Application (JP-A-Heisei 10-98544). In this reference, a control unit (22) adds an originator number or various messages, which are inputted from a key input section (21) to a sub-address data which should be transmitted to a terminal on the side of reception on originating call. Also, the control unit (22) adds a code to the head of the data to identify a classification of the data. Next, a transmitting and receiving section (10) and a communication control section (11) transmit the above sub-address data to the terminal on the side of reception on the originating call. On the other hand, in call arrival, a reception sub address recognizing section (15) receives the sub-address data, which is transmitted from the terminal on the side of transmission. The control unit (22) starts up a free character converting section (16), a fixed form sentence converting section (17), a pictograph converting section (18), and an originator number converting section (19) based on the code added to the sub-address data, and decodes the received data. The decoded data such as the originator number and the various messages are displayed on a display section. In this way, a message notice function and an originator number notice function can be realized between the different kinds of communications systems.
Also, an image processing apparatus is disclosed in Japanese Laid Open Patent Application (JP-A-Heisei 9-325958). In this reference, a character string before conversion is displayed in a display area (905) of a conversion screen, and a character string after the conversion is displayed in a display area (906). These character strings are displayed in units of rows character by character. A character string of “” is specified and a pictograph converting button (1202) is clicked. At that time, pictographs corresponding to the string are carried to arrangement positions of the pictographs by a hamster CH1. The pictograph CH2 corresponding to the character string of “” before the conversion is carried out above of the character of “”. Then, the character of “” is deleted from the screen.